Gluten Free Cheese & Garlic Scones (with Recipe Video)

Scones are such a perfect late afternoon treat, a wonderful accompaniment to a good cup of tea! A well made scone is a delight to bite into - buttery, soft and light. Best enjoyed fresh out of the oven, they come in all kids of flavors. Plain scones are obviously the classic ones - it’s up to you to enjoy them with butter, clotted cream, jams - whatever you like. I have a personal preference for the flavoured ones. Cinnamon raisin, jasmine tea, lemon blueberry, orange cranberry and cheese just to name a few.

As much as I love my sugar, these cheese scones have a special place in my heart. These are great especially when you have a craving for a salty, cheesy snack. They are loaded with cheddar cheese and the added garlic gives it the extra oomph! Even though these scones would be good enough with cheese alone, I would highly recommend adding garlic. For this recipe, I prefer to use garlic powder or dry garlic bread sprinkle - not recommended to use fresh garlic. If you are using the sprinkle, you may need to make adjustments on the salt content in the recipe based on the salt level of the ingredients you’re using. Also you may need to make a judgement call based on the strength of the garlic powder you have in the pantry.

The most important step in making scones is the process of combining the butter with the flour. The method you use should depend on the weather. Singapore is really hot so all recipes that require the butter to be cut into the flour by hand do not yield the best results as the butter starts to melt quite fast. My preferred method is to use the food processor to pulse butter into tiny pieces into the flour. In this hot and humid weather, it is best to cut the butter into cubes and freeze it before using. There is also an option to grate butter into the flour using a wide box grater. Again this required the butter to be chilled / frozen. But again I do not recommend for hot weather as the butter can start to melt when in touch with the hands (maybe my hands are too warm always!) It’s also very important to leave the dough to rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

It’s also important to have leavening in the scone mixture. This recipe uses baking powder and a milk and egg mixture is used to moisten the dough. In case your recipe uses buttermilk to make scones, you can use a combination of baking powder and baking soda. This is a very good combination for leavening used popularly in muffins. The favourite cheese in our home is a mild cheddar cheese - its always a part of my pizza recipes and also an integral part of all cheese platters. You can choose the cheese of your preference for this scone. I will recommend to use a hard cheese though - refrain from the soft cheeses for this preparation. This scone recipe was adapted from this recipe on the King Arthur Flour website.

The recipe was also an opportunity for the kids and I to try our hand at another video. My daughter is the editing expert who can turn a set of video clips to a wonderful recipe video, complete with the needed animations and music and all the instructions typed out! It gives us something to do together as a family in the lockdown period. I love the time we’ve been able to spend together creating these fun videos. We have had a lot of laughs and learnt our way on making these recipe videos come to life.